The first 100,000 words: Writings on Education by a Teacher

Steven Kolber, Teacher   The culture wars have been reignited by Ministers of Education, tapping into the earlier History Wars and bringing discussion of the Australian Curriculum consultation document into mainstream media reportage.   This continues an ongoing challenge to education, where ill-informed political intervention into teaching matters leads to reductive and simplistic conclusions. These simplistic conclusions overlook the genuine expertise and professionalism of teachers and show a bizarre disconnection and misunderstanding of teachers’ work.   The Australian Curriculum is essentially an internal document, not really relevant to those not connected in delivering it. My experience of reading the proposed changes to the Australian Curriculum: Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) curriculum was one of simple appreciation. The streamlining and reduction of content will lighten the burden of an overstuffed curriculum and the greater embedding of the ...

  Steven Kolber and Keith Heggart   The Problem & the Proposal  One of the most widely accepted facts in education is that teachers and academics often do not mix.  This hurts teacher’s engagement with research and its application in the classrooms. Social media, and Twitter especially, holds the potential to bring together teachers, academics, and others within shared spaces to develop collaborative approaches to research and to actively engage with it. Important within this is the idea of a pracademic: a person capable of working between and within the teaching profession and the world of research. As such individuals seem to hold the key to narrowing this gap.    Social Media as ‘third space’ The concept of the pracademic is relevant when one considers the increasing expectations for teachers to be both research-based practitioners and data literate. Pracademics have relevance to improving education systems through their boundary-...

  Steven Kolber Keith Heggart Steven Kolber, a teacher in Melbourne, has been using social media for many years, in a professional and teacherly manner, seeking engagement, community and new approaches to teaching. What he has come to realise, is that whilst many seem to view social media as a place to trade worksheets and classroom displays, for some of the more engaged educators it’s a death match of ideas. For Keith Heggart, a researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, his engagement with social media is more about tracking trends through a process referred to online as ‘lurking’, which involves actively following an online space but not always engaging with these. This approach is not uncommon for researchers, looking to engage with education movements, where more bite-sized ideas can be accessed. Whilst each of these approaches are different, they both represent fertile grounds for professional learning and worthy of exploration through this lens.  A g...

  Curtailing the long tail of disadvantage in Australia requires looking from the statistics to the realities on the ground within schools for solutions to this thorny and long-standing problem. As John Hattie notes, the number of well-meaning adults within schools has exploded in number, but it has not coincided with a comparable growth in learning or student success.  As part of ACERs reconsideration of Geoff Masters blog: ‘ Big Five’ challenges in school education , five years on, I’ll be reflecting on his proposals and providing two of my own as ways of achieving his suggestions.   I will be joining Sue Thomson from ACER and Anne Hampshire from the Smith Family in a  webinar today  to discuss ‘The long tail of  underachievement ’, one of the ‘Big Five’ challenges outlined by Masters. As has been well established, 1 in 5 of all 15-year-old students do not meet the minimum literacy requirements outlined by the OECD through its PISA test....

  For teachers, no news is good news Steven Kolber As a teacher and a parent, education news, for me, is rarely good. We, teachers and parents, use news reporting to shape our understanding of the education system. But recent research has found that teachers are demoralised by endless negative news coverage of teachers and teaching, with the 200 parents surveyed also noting the negative tone of education reporting. With many teachers noting news avoidance as a strategy to counter this demoralisation.   The early indicators from this year’s NAPLAN results show that Victoria has led the nation across all test areas. Despite our extended lockdowns, we must emphasise that this is a superb result for our teaching workforce in Victoria. These results are timely as the Australian Education Union and the Department of Education are negotiating the new enterprise bargaining agreement for Victorian education workers.   Yet when there is positive education news, such as ...

  Education focused pracademics on twitter: building democratic fora   Steven Kolber Department of Education and Training, Brunswick Secondary College, Melbourne, Australia, and Keith Heggart Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney, Ultimo, Australia   Abstract   Purpose – This paper explores the features of pracademic practice within online spaces where pracademics, academics and teachers interact.   Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses autoethnographic case studies to showcase the boundary- spanning thinking of two pracademics, one a practicing teacher, the other an early career researcher, to provide an overview of how pracademics are engaging with research and the profession online in Australia, in 2021. Findings – The paper describes five key features that are central to the development of pracademic practice. They are rigour and depth, discussion beyond immediate cultural context, accessibility, knowledg...